How he had cherished those solitary expeditions—especially after the death of his mother. There was a laziness in that wood—at least during those summers the Sranc shunned the Pale. He could sprawl across the leaves and be so reckless as to doze, daydream while rotating his gaze between high craning limbs, ponder the fork of the great and singular into the frail and many. He could listen to things creak and coo through the hollow chorus of the canopy. His body, as slight as it was, would seem strong enough, hale enough, and he would feel as hidden without as obvious within. And it would seem that nothing could be more common and more holy than a boy alone with his wonder in the sunny wood.
So he deemed the small ball of fur a gift, nothing less than a puzzle-box left by the Gods. He marvelled at its weightlessness, the way the breeze could tug it on his palm. He held it even to his eyes and stroked it with a fingertip. The fleece was marred by something poking from within.
The ball pulled apart with the ease of bread drawn from the oven, and bundled within he found bones, as white as a child’s teeth, a motley the size of leaf stems and insect legs. He drew out a skull smaller than the nail of his pinky, held it between thumb and forefinger …
For several slow and thick heartbeats, he felt like a God, an eye rendered pitiless for mad disproportion.
He cleared a patch of earth, arranged the contents across it. Children are forever inventing diverse tasks and the imaginary worlds that give them meaning. He was a priest in that moment, ruthless and old, scrying telltale traces of the future in the debris of the past. Fur and bones, as crucial to life as pole and canvas were to shelter. A whip-poor-will called out from the forest deep.
With a start he remembered his father telling him that owls did this, regurgitated the hair and bones of their prey. All along he had known it was a mouse, but he had believed otherwise. He looked up, peered between the oak’s raised arms searching for some sign of the nocturnal predator.
Nothing.
Nothing, he had thought in a haze of inexplicable alarm, for it no longer seemed that he was playing. Nothing had devoured the mouse.
Digesting all that lived.
Spitting out all that mattered.
One could tell them apart by midmorning, the Upright Horn soaring on a curve pulled erect, and the Canted Horn leaning out over unseen tracts. Both arms climbed ever higher, balled into feminine fists, parting clouds as golden oars might part murky waters, rising above the hanging cliffs and gorges of the vast crater rim the Nonmen had called Vilursis.
The Occlusion.
Sorweel and Zsoronga laboured with their packs, wandered with the others in endless roping chains, Men in their tens of thousands, freighted with arms, rancid and grim, drawn as fish to flashing silver. All hearts sloshed in same cold dark water, it seemed. There was no prayer, no hymns, no cries of relief or exultation. Some looked as though they could not so much as blink, let alone speak. He and Zsoronga scaled the slopes of the Occlusion, peered in wonder at the ruins of the Akeokinoi upon the summits, beacon towers from Far Antiquity. They crowded through the canine slots, then joined the myriads stumping down the dusty gravel ramps on the far side, gazing mute and agog as they fanned across the interior waste.
Their bowels quailed. Their thoughts seized. Their hearts kicked as roped foals.
“Such a thing …” the Zeumi murmured.
Sorweel had no reply.
They skidded down the gravel slopes, two upon a conveyor of descending thousands, mostly Conriyans above and below, and thousands of others, on and on, all transfixed by the image … the insane image.
The Inc?-Holoinas.
Rearing monstrous from the mathematical heart of the Ring, reaching up to dwarf the crimson setting sun …
The Ark.
Aching for leaning. Blinding where it was burnished, great tracts of mirror-gold ablaze hoisted ever higher, casting leagues of crimson across the lifeless plain—across the appalled nations of Men.
Blood etched their toiling shadows.
How … How could such a thing be? Ishterebinth was but a crude totem in comparison. How could mere intellect raise such arms, great and golden, to the very clouds? How could a contrivance, a mighty city encased in swan-curved hulls, crash from the limit of the sky, crack the very ground asunder, and still remain intact?
A chill shimmied through Sorweel’s bones, mounted his heart, his soul. It was the Amiolas, he realized. He knew this place, not as anything he could recall or relate, but as the boot-print knows the heel. Though he had lost all that had belonged to Immiriccas, he had not lost his memory of plumbing those abyssal memories, nor the bent of having once been twisted about such a life. He knew this place! The way an orphan knows his father. The way the dead know life.
This place … this accursed place! It had stolen everything.
A cancer. A blight. An evil that eclipsed imagination!
Fields of gawking Men descended about him, bearding the slopes with dust.
Immensity has a way of exposing silence, pulling it nude from the immeasurable background. For all the thousands tramping and murmuring about him, Sorweel could hear it, as surely as if he sat perched upon the cloud-wreathed summit, the hush of transcendence, of looming beyond the compass of human comprehension, and sharing bones with the very World.
The Unholy Ark. The great terror of legend, fallen from the Void, gleaming mountainous above a great network of fortifications, squat towers and black-curtain walls. Min-Uroikas.
Golgotterath.
“Real …” Zsoronga gasped.
Sorweel understood, well enough to whiten his knuckles about the realization. The name had always been there—since before King Harweel’s fiery murder, the name of this place had crouched above all. The pretext. The rationale of innumerable atrocities. For all the bluster of the Sakarpi Horselords, for all their vainglorious conceit, he knew they had all asked themselves the same question gazing across the stupendous host that had gathered to throw down their walls …
How? How could wife-tales and nursery rhymes deliver us to destruction?
How could the whole Three Seas go mad?
All of them upon the ramparts, King and Boonsmen alike, had resigned themselves to die defending their city. And all of them had marvelled and lamented that madness and fancy could seal their fate …
A fantasy that had been real.
A hammer struck his heart, and he gasped, reeled upon liquified limbs. Zsoronga seized him before he pitched headlong, steadied him, drew him forward as though he were a little brother or a wife.
Nothing. Harweel had died for pride and folly … for nothing.
Exactly as Proyas had said he would.